The night his Los Angeles Lakers, finally, would return to their place of glory atop the NBA, Jerry West would not be in attendance.

“Oh, I won’t be there,” he told me on the phone, referring to what was then called Staples Center.

Wait, what?

The 1999-2000 Lakers, the team West had, at the cost of his nerves and health, put together for this very purpose, winning L.A.’s first hoops title in more than a decade, were a game away from conquering the Indiana Pacers in the finals. They would be coronated on their home floor. It would be the franchise’s first championship since 1988. It would be the culmination of West’s singular quest, having moved heaven and earth and most of the existing roster to get both Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant on the same team, and having swallowed his own pride to bring Phil Jackson in to coach. It would be marvelous.

And it would be done without West’s presence.

This wasn’t new for West. Such moments, now that he no longer could bring his prodigious talents to the court and impact winning games as a player, drove him to severe distraction. During Lakers home games, he would often drive around town instead. Sometimes, he’d check in to Chick Hearn’s mellifluous voice to see how things were going. That night, though, he kept the car stereo silent. He drove up the Ventura Freeway to Santa Barbara, a hundred miles north of the city.

“I told my friend Bobby Freedman only to call me if there was good news,” West wrote in his searing autobiography, “West by West.”

It wasn’t because he didn’t care, of course. It was because he cared so very, very much.

West’s death Wednesday at 86 caused more than one person around the league to choke up.

“It’s a very sad day,” said West’s contemporary and fellow Hall of Famer, Oscar Robertson, on the phone Wednesday afternoon.

West was, for decades, the personification of the sport. Few people’s counsel was more courted, so synonymous was he with the dogged, relentless pursuit of excellence. He was part of a dynasty as a player that couldn’t solve the Celtics, and then built dynasties as an executive that finally did. He was a 14-time All-Star and 12-time All-NBA selection. Two Lakers behemoths were built on his watch as the team’s general manager: the Magic Johnson-led squad that captured five titles in the 1980s, then the O’Neal-Bryant squads that laid down a three-peat between 2000 and 2003.

As Red Auerbach did for the Celtics, 3,000 miles east, West constantly was at the center of teardowns and rebirths of the Lakers. Decade after decade, the Lakers continued to matter in the NBA, riding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic and James Worthy through the ’80s, just as Boston continued to pile up the banners after the end of the Bill Russell Era, through John Havlicek, Jo Jo White and Dave Cowens in the 1970s, then Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson. The Cs are currently hunting their 18th NBA title in their finals series this year with the Dallas Mavericks; the Lakers, their last title coming in the Orlando Bubble in 2020, are tied with the Celtics at 17.

I ranked Auerbach one and West two on my all-time list of NBA executives in 2017 for NBA.com. Nothing’s changed my mind in the intervening years. They were the ultimate architects, with Auerbach’s intimidating tactics and amazing motivational ability serving as the mechanical rabbit at a dog racing track, as West chased after the Celtics for a generation.

“I secretly liked and admire Red’s brazen ways, and he is one of the coaches I would have loved to compete for,” West wrote. “. … Red was the figure everyone loved to hate, and he didn’t mind it one bit. He didn’t mind being the villain. He would be anything you wanted him to be as long as it helped the Celtics win.”

But West doesn’t take a back seat to anyone when it comes to talent evaluation. He was the best ever. No former superstar as a player was in more gyms in more small towns and in more countries than West was, year after year, trying to find the next great talent. He didn’t get stuck in nostalgia; he still got excited about current players. He raved about Terance Mann when Mann was a little-known second-round pick playing for the Clippers in the Vegas Summer League in 2019.

He kept his own counsel about who, and what, he liked.

“It’s not so much trust,” he told me once. “I just think if you ask 10 people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. If you ask five people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. I’d rather not confuse myself by asking 10 people.”

Like Auerbach, West had eternal swag, the way Dr. J and Pat Riley and only a handful of aging luminaries still do. He was still in high demand after he left the Lakers in 2000, moving on to executive roles with the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and LA Clippers well into his 80s. It was West’s steadfast refusal to sign off on a proposed trade of Klay Thompson for Kevin Love in 2014 that kept Golden State’s ownership from pulling the trigger, and kept the Splash Brothers from being split up before they went on their franchise-changing championship run.

You still felt his crackling intensity in person, or on the phone. Well into middle age, I’d still get goose bumps when my phone would ring and the caller ID would identify who was on the other line. (He was “TLogo” in my contacts list, for obvious reasons.) He would always answer pleasantly: “David? Jerry West.”

As if it could have been someone else.

He was, given his pedigree, humble and deferential about his own successes. West was venerated for the 60-footer he hit at the end of regulation of Game 3 of the 1970 finals against New York to tie the game and send it into overtime. All West remembered, though, is that the Knicks won 111-108 in OT. He averaged an astounding 46.3 points per game in the Lakers’ Western Division series victory over Baltimore in 1965, which is still the record for highest average in a single postseason series.

He could be caustic and cutting about today’s players, the state of the game, David Stern and anyone else who didn’t measure up to his standards at a given moment. He could be withering about his own team. But if they weren’t winning doing it their way, he had very little patience for them. The portrayal of him in the HBO miniseries “Winning Time” was an ugly caricature of his manic intensity, one that made his friends and colleagues justifiably angry. He wasn’t someone who foamed at the mouth and spent his days trashing the offices at The Forum in some blinding rage. He didn’t big-time people.

And if anyone could have done so without argument, it was him.

But no one wanted to win more than Jerry West, and he spent his whole life proving it.

He won state titles in high school in West Virginia, at East Bank High School – which, every March 24, the day East Bank won the title in 1956, renames itself “West Bank” for a day in his honor. He won at West Virginia University, where he led the Mountaineers to the NCAA national championship game in 1959, which WVU lost by one point to the University of California, 71-70. He won on the celebrated 1960 U.S. Olympic team, a team just as dominant as the Dream Team would be 32 years later. The 1960 team won its eight games in Rome at the Summer Games by an average of 42.4 points per game. West, Robertson, Walt Bellamy, Jerry Lucas and coach Pete Newell all were inducted individually into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, as was the 1960 team itself as a unit, in 2010.

“We just melded right away,” Robertson said. “Pete Newell was the coach, and he put our starting five together. And we knew what was at stake, because we were all there to make the Olympic team. Jerry was a nice guy. Matter of fact, I knew him through Adrian Smith (who also played on the 1960 Olympic team). I met him through Adrian. He was there with the U.S. Army team. I’m sure our backgrounds sort of paralleled each other, because of where Jerry came from and I came from, we didn’t have anything except basketball.”

The word tortured is often used to describe West. Indeed. Demons, which took root during a difficult and lonely childhood in his native West Virginia, where his imagination was his best friend and he shot thousands of shots so that he wouldn’t have to return home, ate at him throughout his life. There was little love in the West home, and physical abuse of the children at the hand of their father. Jerry West was driven, in the best and worst sense of that word, to strive, to chase perfection, to be hollowed out by defeat and only briefly salved by victory.

“I am, if I may say so, an enigma (even to myself, especially to myself), and an obsessive, someone whose mind ranges far and wide and returns to the things that, for better or worse, hold me in their thrall,” West wrote in his book.

West played on the first great L.A. team, after its move from Minneapolis, in 1960, alongside fellow future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor. They made pro basketball on the West Coast, setting a standard of excellence that was held off only by Auerbach, Bill Russell and the Celtics.

Six times during West’s playing career, the Lakers and Celtics met in the championship series. Six times, Boston defeated L.A. The last time, in 1969, West was named the finals MVP, becoming the only player to ever receive the award while on the losing team. The Lakers also played the Knicks in the finals three times between 1970 and 1973. Only in 1972 did West’s team win, giving him one NBA title in nine tries.

“It was great to compete against Jerry,” Robertson said. “Jerry was a tremendous athlete. I don’t know about other guys, but I love playing against great basketball players. Because you have to improve your basketball yourself. You don’t know where you are until you play against great basketball players. And Jerry was, no doubt about it, one of the best of all. I thought Jerry was a great basketball player, great shooter.”

But West could be as stubborn as he was talented.

When the NBA, with great fanfare and not insignificant calling in of decades-long chits, brought its 50 greatest players of all time to All-Star Weekend in Cleveland in 1997, 47 of the 49 living players attended. (Pete Maravich had died in 1988 while playing a pickup game, at age 40; O’Neal was recovering from knee surgery.) West was the only one who didn’t come. At the time, the reason given was that he had just undergone a recent surgery.

The surgery part was true. But that’s not why he didn’t show up. He didn’t show because he was angry with the Orlando Magic, who had accused him of tampering with O’Neal while he was still under contract with the Magic in order to secure Shaq as a free agent.

West was famously blown away by Bryant’s workout for the Lakers before the 1996 draft, and schemed with his close friend, Bryant’s agent, Arn Tellem, to get Bryant to the West Coast. When West was in your corner, you’d never have a fiercer advocate.

There was the famous story, that Lakers executive Mitch Kupchak re-told many years later, of how the Lakers took Vlade Divac in the 1989 draft, with West the single, lone voice opting for the Serbian center over the objections of everyone else in the front office.

“We all picked the other guy,” Kupchak said. “I think it was (Missouri center) Gary Leonard. We all agree. Then (West) leans down into the mic, which was hooked up to New York so that we can announce our choice. Our guy up there was Hampton Mears. And Jerry says, ‘Hampton’ – he’s looking at us when he says this – he says, ‘Hampton, the Lakers take Divac.’ The three of us were like, ‘Why are we even here?’ And he says, ‘He’s just too damned talented to pass on.’ And he walked out of the room.”

As ever, the Logo was alone, with his thoughts, his doggedness and imagination, once again, having served him well.

Required reading

• What was Jerry West really like? On the phone with him, the NBA universe opened up
• Reactions to Jerry West’s death pour in: ‘A basketball genius’
• NBA75: West was ‘Mr. Clutch’ and forever will be brutally honest about himself

(Photo of Jerry West and Oscar Robertson: Vernon Biever / NBAE via Getty Images)

Three years ago, Shana Ferguson stood on the pool deck in Omaha, Neb., at the U.S. Olympic Trials, thrilled to be staring out at the crowd of more than 12,000 swimming fans. But she dared to dream bigger.

Like, a lot bigger.

“What would this look like in a football stadium?” Ferguson wondered aloud.

Three years later, after countless meetings regarding electrical engineering, plumbing and drainage, wonderment has finally given way to reality. Ferguson, USA Swimming’s chief commercial officer, and her team of vendors are just days away from kicking off the most important swimming meet on American soil this quadrennial in front of what they expect to be the largest crowd ever to attend a swim meet.

The upcoming U.S. Olympic Trials are set to run from June 15-23 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, making it the first time the Olympic qualifying meet will be held in a football stadium. Event organizers hope to see a crowd close to 30,000 for the first night of finals, which would shatter the previous world record.

It will be a spectacle — to put it mildly.

“This is the first time this has ever been attempted in the world,” said Mark Dodd, the president of Dodd Technologies, which essentially served as USA Swimming’s general contractor for the event. “There will be a lot of people who are going to come to this and take a look at what we built. We’re going to be the model.”

Added Ferguson: “We need to make sure to give these athletes an amazing experience that will be, for many of them, the pinnacle of their careers. We have a responsibility to make this a really wickedly cool environment for them.”

It all started, unsurprisingly, with the pool itself, which was built over the past three weeks, with construction beginning on May 12 and wrapping up this week. Nearly two million gallons of water were brought in from the nearby White River; it will then be held in tanks that allow it to be constantly circulated, cleaned and chlorinated before it filters in and out of the three pools that have been built.

“When you watch this on television, it will look like an in-ground pool, like the pool is on floor level,” Ferguson said. “But we’re putting an above-ground pool on the cement and building a deck around it. The pool with the decking will actually end up striking the first 10 rows of seats.”

Elevating the pool deck and fans’ perceived ground level creates enough depth for the three required pools. One is the 50-meter-long, three-meter-deep competition pool — the standard depth for elite swimming — where all eyes will be trained for the nine nights; the other two are warmup pools, which will be separated from the competition pool by a curtain at the 50-yard line.

Myrtha Pools, a company that specializes in constructing and dismantling large-scale temporary pools, built the competition pool and two warmup pools. Spear Corp. in nearby Roachdale, Ind., has handled all of the plumbing, pumps and filtration. Dodd’s team is specifically in charge of the decking, the scoreboard, the signage and all other accoutrements that make the event work.

“Really, our biggest challenge was trying to figure out what is traditionally a close-up spectator sport in a small natatorium and scaling it so that it works in a space of this size,” Dodd said.

In short, USA Swimming is trying to keep up with its surging demand. This event continues to grow — and outgrow its venues — seemingly every Olympic cycle. The last time trials were in Indianapolis, in 2000, the event was held at the 4,700-seat Indiana University Natatorium. Trials then went outdoors to Long Beach, Calif., for 2004, and then moved to a basketball arena in downtown Omaha, Neb., from 2008 through 2021. (Myrtha Pools also built the pool in Long Beach and the four pools in Omaha.) In 2016, nearly 200,000 fans attended 15 sold-out sessions. The venue could hold about 13,000 for swimming events.

Lucas Oil Stadium can seat way more than that. Its swimming configuration allows for a capacity of around 30,000 with regular stadium seats facing the competition pool as well as some 20 rows of movable seats that will be in front of the midfield curtain to create a fully enclosed oval of fans. Organizers have planned theme nights (including celebrations for Father’s Day and Juneteenth, which fall during the event). They are also partnering with the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and WNBA’s Fever to help draw new fans who may not already know much about swimming.

While there will certainly be seats far from the water’s surface, Dodd said the sight lines for more than 25,000 spectators seats are quite good.

“I don’t necessarily know that it’ll be weird or strange, but it’ll be different,” said University of Virginia coach Todd DeSorbo, who will serve as the head U.S. women’s team coach in Paris. “The more people, the better. And I think the kids will feed off the energy of the crowd.”

Those night sessions — where fans will see top-two finishers punch their tickets to Paris — will be memorable, event organizers say. There will be a 50-foot-tall video board behind athletes as they are announced and walk onto the pool deck ahead of each final. Ferguson compared it to player introductions for “Monday Night Football”; Dodd said it will be a level of lighting and production similar to WWE. There will also be a center-hung scoreboard (similar to basketball arenas) because the scoring and timing need to be centered over the pool, not where video boards are located in football stadiums along the perimeter.

Perhaps the best benefit of the football stadium is the warmup pool setup. In Omaha, the warmup pools were located at the convention center due to space constraints inside the arena. In Indianapolis, they’ll be a curtain away from the competition pool.

“The thing I’m most looking forward to is actually having space,” said University of Texas head coach Bob Bowman, who famously coached Michael Phelps throughout his career and will again take a crop of Olympic hopefuls to trials. “In Omaha, it got so crowded that I just stopped going into the main pool and watching the races because I couldn’t get over there quick enough to help people warm up and warm down. So, I would just watch it on the big screen in the warmup pool.

“This is going to be great for participants.”

In what Ferguson calls the back-of-house athlete experience, there will be quiet areas, massages, therapy dogs, nutritional assistance, mental health experts and even a video game room.

“So much of this is nerves and hopes and dreams,” Ferguson said. “We’ve got to ensure even in a big stadium that we are still giving the athletes and coaches a feeling of intimacy, where they can have quiet and solitude and focus so that it isn’t just big lights and Hollywood and excitement.”

In short, this is not just sticking a pool in a football stadium and figuring out where and how to drain the water. It’s a new use of a venue that has to serve myriad purposes for multiple stakeholders at the same time.

And in a week, it will be put to the ultimate test — just like the best of the best American swimmers will be.

An artist’s rendering of the finished product, complete with fans. Lucas Oil Stadium will be the first football stadium to host swimming’s U.S. Olympic Trials. (Courtesy of USA Swimming)

(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of USA Swimming, Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire via Getty)

Kate Martin wants to make one thing clear: She is a punctual person.

That bus in Dallas that left her in the parking lot after a Las Vegas Aces team meal? “They set me up,” Martin says of her teammates’ recent viral prank on the rookie. “Come on, now. I would never be late.

“Coach (Becky Hammon) said she had to talk to me, and then I was talking to her — of no substance. I was really confused. I thought it was something important, and then they had been planning it the whole time.”

The Aces’ bus almost left without Kate Martin 😂

🎥 @_ajawilson22 pic.twitter.com/GXPQzSRdUc

— The Athletic WBB (@TheAthleticWBB) June 5, 2024

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In fairness, everyone on the Aces acknowledges Martin’s discipline. As Hammon says, “She just doesn’t make mistakes.” It’s one of the many reasons Las Vegas — the players, the coaches, the fans — has come to love Martin, as she keeps living the best feel-good story in the WNBA.

One month into the season, Martin is averaging more than 20 minutes per game for the two-time defending champs and is often Hammon’s first sub off the bench, which makes it easy to forget how noteworthy it is that Martin is in this position. She averaged double-digit scoring once in her five years at Iowa, while playing in the national spotlight cast on Caitlin Clark, and she earned all-Big Ten honors in only that final season. Martin was a complementary player in a draft class filled with star power.

Near the end of her college career, she spoke about relishing the final days at Iowa before becoming a “regular old Joe Schmo.” She didn’t even have an agent during the WNBA Draft. She simply asked her Iowa coaches to speak to some pro coaches and, from that intel, inferred that she would be selected in the third round at best. Martin attended the draft to support Clark and didn’t plan on walking if or when she was picked because she hadn’t been invited by the league and her name would presumably be called late in the night.

But Hammon and the Aces were more interested in Martin than she knew. Whenever Hammon and her staff watched Iowa games, she said they came away thinking, “Damn, we love that Kate Martin kid! Oh, she’s so good, she’s so solid.”

Those crossing signals ended up producing one of the highlights of the draft, as the producers asked Martin — who was seated in the audience — to move to the aisle of her row at the end of the first round. She noticed the cameras start to close in when the Aces selected Syracuse’s Dyaisha Fair with the 16th pick. Two picks later, it was Martin’s turn to shake hands with league commissioner Cathy Engelbert and make her way across the Brooklyn Academy of Music stage.

KATE MARTIN TO THE ACES!!!! #WNBADraft pic.twitter.com/1C55qt0mVY

— Aliyah Funschelle (@AliyahFun) April 16, 2024

Even being drafted didn’t guarantee that Martin’s WNBA career would still be alive and well. Between 2021 and 2023, only 13 of the 36 second-round picks made their team’s opening-night roster, and a few of those players were cut before the end of the regular season. Martin was joining a Las Vegas squad with a crowded training camp roster competing for only a few spots.

The week of the draft, Martin got an assist in the process of making the roster from her future teammate Kelsey Plum, who extended Martin a last-minute invite to her Dawg Class to help her prepare for training camp. “We had an open spot, and I was like, ‘Kate Martin, for sure. Let’s go,’” Plum said.

Once Martin got to Las Vegas, she steadily edged out the competition with her work ethic — what the Aces call the “try hard factor” — and mind. She hopes to coach after her playing career and demonstrated that aptitude with her ability to pick up terminology and schemes. Hammon recalled one instance when she was installing a new, somewhat complex sideline out-of-bounds play. As her teammates set up the play on the court, Martin noticed from the sideline that they were lined up incorrectly and pointed it out.

“To be able to make those adjustments and speak up, this is an ATO she’s just seen, but she understood conceptually what we were trying to do and then she could put the pieces together,” Hammon said. “So that’s a great sign.”

It was also fortuitous for Martin to land in Las Vegas, a place where she will never need to be a star. The Aces need role players to surround their superstar quartet, and Martin was elite at that assignment in college playing next to Clark. She sets good screens, she moves the ball, she cuts hard to the basket, and she makes open jumpers. Las Vegas will never call a play for Martin, but she knows how to impact games regardless.

Martin credits Iowa coach Lisa Bluder for helping her read the game. Bluder always said she didn’t want to coach robots, and that forced Martin to develop her IQ and learn how to make decisions without set plays. Hammon grants the Aces freedom on the court, which is a natural extension of the Hawkeyes offense.

Martin cried when she learned she made the final roster, but it’s the Aces who would have been in a world of hurt without her through the first quarter of the season. In her first WNBA game, Martin blocked 6-foot-7 Li Yueru from behind and hasn’t looked back since. She’s shooting 37 percent on 3-pointers, a mark that’s better than every team in the league except the Minnesota Lynx. Las Vegas is 0.7 points per 100 possessions better with her on the court than off it.

Hammon has deployed Martin in small-ball lineups as a three or four, then started her at shooting guard against the Los Angeles Sparks, against whom she scored a career-high 13 points and made all three of her 3-pointers.

Her first 3 almost brought the lid off the roof of Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, despite the Aces being the road team. Just as she was with the Hawkeyes, Martin is a fan favorite wherever she goes.

Rookie Kate Martin is on fire in her first career start, dropping 11 PTS by halftime and going a perfect 3-3 from deep 🔥

WNBA Commissioner’s Cup presented by @coinbase | LVA-LAS on League Pass pic.twitter.com/qrNoOiu9sW

— WNBA (@WNBA) June 10, 2024

“Honestly, I didn’t expect that,” Martin said. “I never expect anything, really. I had no expectations coming to the league, and I think that’s what’s been so fun is that I got an opportunity, and I made the best team in the world, and then it’s just been a lot of fun since.”

Martin also has a ton of fans within her locker room. In Hammon’s first two seasons as Las Vegas’ coach, she played her four rookies a total of 524 minutes. Martin was already at 183 heading into Thursday’s game, the second most ever afforded among Hammon’s six total rookies. A’ja Wilson loves Martin’s energy and that she is always ready when her name is called; the two-time MVP is continually breathing confidence into Martin, encouraging her to shoot and trying to uplift her whenever possible. Plum calls her “an amazing sponge.” Martin has already drawn comparisons to Alysha Clark as a glue player, and Clark has taken the 2024 draftee under her wing.

The veterans might mess with her — peep the Hello Kitty backpack Martin is required to carry on trips — but she takes it as a sign of love. After all, the day after her teammates tried to ditch her in a restaurant parking lot, it was Martin’s birthday, and arguably the best player in the world got her a cake, ribbon and tiara.

Going into the season, it might not have been evident that Martin would be relied upon to this extent as Las Vegas chases a three-peat. But one thing to know about that Aces rookie — she’s ahead of schedule.

(Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)